A review by _kiratune
Portrait of a Thief by Grace D. Li

adventurous reflective medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated

2.75

Man, i really wanted to like this book because the premise is still outstanding and cool and i would have loved to read a better book with this exact premise. But the author didn’t really manage to pull off two things that would have been crucial: The heists are glossed over, all we get is heist vibes but none of the technicalities and it’s obviously because the author didn’t research and plot it out, so we get the same sentence about checking museum security, vaguely, whatever that means, every time. There is no cat and mouse game between the kids and the FBI. The second thing is the diaspora aspect: The main groups stories are diverse on the surface level, but deep down they say and think the exact same thing about everything, and it’s not believable that both a confident character and an insecure character have the exact same inner monologue. The descriptive writing was at times nice and it was cool to see a Chinese-american lived reality, emotionally, but towards the end i flinched at the phrase „full of possibility“ and several others because they were in there so often, you could play a drinking game with that. All in all it’s just feels like a pinterest board of a book - all promise and vibes, like the author would probably word it. Sorry.